Fin de siècle, (
French: “end of the century”) of, relating to, characteristic of, or resembling the late 19th-century literary and artistic climate of sophistication, escapism, extreme aestheticism, world-weariness, and fashionable despair. When used in reference to literature, the term essentially describes the movement inaugurated by the Decadent poets of France and the movement called Aestheticism in England during this period.

La Dame aux Camélias, pen-and-ink drawing by Aubrey Beardsley …

Learn More in these related articles:

any of several poets or other writers of the end of the 19th century, including the French Symbolist poets in particular and their contemporaries in England, the later generation of the Aesthetic movement. Both groups aspired to set literature and art free from the materialistic preoccupations of...

...arts, architecture, and craftsmanship into a single consistent taste recovered the creative unity that had been lost since the early 18th century. In the Netherlands the fin de siècle (“end of the century”; specifically the end of the 19th century, and a phrase that has overtones of a rather precious sophistication and world-weariness)...